Brand protection is one of the most burning issues of modern online and offline commerce. Read this article to get to know more about it!
If you run a business, you most likely realize the significance of brand protection. In this article, we’ll provide insightful statistics on this subject. Plus, we’ll explain how to benefit from brand protection tools, using a real-life example.
General Numbers About Brand Protection
Here are the three main points that we’d like to accentuate first and foremost:
- $3.24 billion is the volume of the global market for security packaging and anticounterfeiting brand protection. By 2026, this number is projected to increase up to $4.26.
- In 2019, nearly 85% of brands reported having become victims of trademark infringement. In the previous year, this issue was typical of 81% of brands and in 2017 — of 74%.
- 77% of brands confess the problem under discussion causes a high concern for them. 57% agree that over time, they tend to realize more and more distinctly the significance of this challenge.
If you think that this issue is not relevant to you, think twice. What if you simply fail to notice violations?
Brands from Which Industries Tend to Suffer the Most?
In this article, we’ll share only a few illustrative facts. However, the list could go on further and further.
- Children are the most vulnerable consumer category. 80% of counterfeit and harmful goods are clothes, toys and others items that little boys and girls interact with.
- In 2016, approximately 4.4 billion counterfeit pharmaceutical goods hit the global market. Today, this number can be even higher.
- Infringement is most typical of web domains and business names (44%). For online marketplaces and social media, this number is 38%. For ads, it’s 34%.
Companies from any niche and of any size can suffer from such types of illegal activities. As a result, their revenues might drop, their reputation might get tarnished and they might lose some part of their customers.
How Do Consumers Come Across Counterfeit Products and How Do They React to Them?
In 2018, nearly one-half of all individuals who bought goods with violated trademarks typed in the names of these goods into search engines.
Slightly less than one-half of businesses say that trademark infringement provokes customer bewilderment in the first place.
What Do Companies Do to Protect Their Brands?
Most frequently, managers use these measures:
- Almost 94% of brands resort to blacklists
- Nearly 88% rely on whitelists
- 84% collaborate with verification partners
- Over 91% of brands use keyword targeting
- Over 80% employ various strategies to place their ads in brand-safe settings
To boost the efficiency of these steps, it’s crucial to collaborate with marketplaces and ensure they don’t sell counterfeit.
What Can Marketplaces Do?
Amazon can serve as a good example in this aspect:
- To prevent abuse and fraud, this marketplace hired over 10,000 professionals and invested over $700 million
- It has embedded powerful verification mechanisms: only 6% of all accounts that users tried to register were allowed to start selling goods
- 6 million attempts to register dubious selling accounts were prevented before even being given a chance to show their products to customers
- Over 2 million counterfeit products were seized and destroyed
- Over 10 billion suspected bad listings were blocked before going online
- Customers complain about counterfeiting sometimes — but this affects fewer than 0.01% of all products sold
Other trading platforms should borrow Amazon’s best practices.
I Want to Protect my Brand. How to Get Started?
The easiest and most affordable way is to begin with online tools. Detect a problem that you’d like to focus on and decide on the initial budget that you can afford to spend on it. Then, start googling for tools.
Let’s consider the real-life example of BluePear. This service was invented to help brands improve their relationships with affiliate partners. Not all webmasters are equally scrupulous. You might lose thousands of USD on affiliates that cannibalize the organic traffic that you drive to your website. As soon as you open https://bluepear.net/, you’ll discover a handy calculator that enables you to assess your losses in a couple of clicks.
To stop such schemes, BluePear can provide these services to you:
- Automatically monitor your branded search queries 24/7 across all devices and without any geographical limitations
- Generate and send reports to you, accompanied by screenshots
- Give factual evidence of the facts of nefarious behavior
This service relies on AI-powered solutions that are highly reliable and productive.
The cost of this work will depend on the frequency of monitoring and the number of keywords. Feel free to submit a request to the BluePear team and they will send you an estimate. If you don’t know which keywords to use, the service representatives will compose the lists for you. You won’t need to integrate BluePear with apps or systems that you already use or set up this product yourself. Its managers will do all the work and deliver the results to you.